‘The Monash Soviet’ and Israel: A case study of how the Australian campus far left lost its way after the 1967 Six-Day War

For a half century, for good and for ill, Western universities have been incubating world views which go on to reshape mainstream opinion. Today’s global anti-Israel movement poses as a defender of internationalist values, but in practice demands a zero-sum solution based on creating a state of Palestine in place of Israel. It totally negates the national rights of Israeli Jews. It delegtimises the dialogue and compromise that could ensure national self-determination for both peoples as shameful ‘collaboration’ and ‘normalisation’. It is an obstacle to peace. Philip Mendes seeks one root of this self-righteous, destructive and polarising politics in the campus left’s simplistic ‘anti-imperialist’ response to the 1967 Six-Day War. The revolutionary left reduced a tragic, complex, and unresolved national question requiring deep mutual recognition and political compromise to a crude morality play, a stage on which to dress up and perform their radical identity.